Projects Ara and Tango were the focus of an ATAP presentation at Google I/O.

SAN FRANCISCO—Google's Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group is one of the parts of Google responsible primarily for "moonshot" projects. Along with Google[x], it generates flashy experiments that sound cool but can't be bought and may never amount to anything, things like the 3D-vision Project Tango phone and tablet and the modular "Project Ara" phone.

Further Reading

New "Project Ara" details show how it works, but that's just half the battle.

Today, in a session at Google I/O, the teams behind Tango and Ara delivered a few demonstrations of their respective projects and gave the press and developers in attendance an update on how they were progressing. Tango, a tablet with 3D cameras similar to Microsoft's Kinect, was described as the most "mature" of the projects—Project lead Johnny Lee had a working tablet onstage, and the developer units are on the floor at I/O for people to play with. In a pair of videos, Tango developers showed the tablet mapping out a building in full 3D, demonstrating a remarkably detailed 3D rendering of a small room. This could be a big deal for indoor mapping, an area in which Google has already shown interest.

Enlarge/ Tango lead Charlie Lee showed off a demo video in which a person made a 3D map of a building by walking around with a Tango tablet.

Andrew Cunningham

Developers will be able to get their hands on the same Tango developer tablet Lee used later this year for $1,024. Lee also announced that Google would be partnering with LG to release a consumer version of the tablet at some point next year.

Enlarge/ Current Ara modules need to use a lot of space on what makes them modular. Future modules will give developers more room to play with.

Andrew Cunningham

Project Ara was more interesting, if only because it's still in an earlier stage of development. We've written before about the tech Google is using to make the modular phone concept plausible—the UniPro and M-PHY standards are used to connect the phone's component blocks to the phone's "endoskeleton," while electropermanent magnets hold it all together. Project Ara lead Paul Eremenko also talked about the Ara's modules—current prototype modules lose around 70 percent of their space to the components that make them modular, leaving just 30 percent of the space available for other components. The next version of the module should swap this ratio, and Eremenko wants future modules to have an overhead of as little as 10 percent.

We watch a Project Ara phone come very close to booting. Note the amount of time it takes. We cut out about 15 seconds of staring at a blank screen. Even the developers don't seem sure it will work.

Ara moved from concept render to physical mockup in about six months, and onstage today Google demonstrated a version of the phone that could just about boot to the Android home screen. In the demo above, the phone displayed a partial boot screen before freezing. The full boot time (had the demo worked as intended) would be about a minute, which would be a long time for a shipping phone but is reasonably impressive for such an early prototype.

Software is the other thing that Ara's developers need to figure out. Current Android builds ship with support for the hardware the phone runs, but they don't include a whole bunch of extraneous drivers for other modems or Wi-Fi modules or cameras or SoCs. Current phone hardware doesn't change, so Android doesn't typically need to worry about this kind of thing.

Eremenko reiterated that Android would need to change to support hot-swapping and better class drivers if Ara is to succeed. As reported previously, Ara is currently running a fork of Android that can do these things, and it won't be integrated into the main platform any time soon.

Eremenko ended the Ara presentation by offering $100,000 to any team that could make a working Ara module that did "something that current smartphones can't do." For interested parties, Ara's Module Developers Kit (MDK) is available here.

Andrew Cunningham / Andrew has a B.A. in Classics from Kenyon College and has over five years of experience in IT. His work has appeared on Charge Shot!!! and AnandTech, and he records a weekly book podcast called Overdue.